Men who call themselves bisexual are liars. At least that’s what
the New York Times science section said in “Straight, Gay
or Lying: Bisexuality Revisited” ( July 5, 2005).

We often hear this kind of prejudice and misinformation in
popular media, even in the gay and lesbian press. But how did a
distinguished daily come to such a conclusion? How did the “national
newspaper of record” decide that men who are attracted to more than
one gender are really inventing their interest in women and
repressing a “true” homosexual identity?

The following is an account of what the research underlying this
article is really about, and what kind of impact it has had on
millions of bisexual people and those who love them. It’s a story I
know a lot about. I debated reparative therapist Joseph Nicolosi on
CNN in 1993. For over 20 years I have worked to educate people about
biphobia and how it’s interwoven with homophobia, heterosexism, and
gynophobia in our society. Still, I was taken by surprise by the
Times story. My summer hasn’t been the same since.

Times reporter Benedict Carey’s article was based on his
reading of “Sexual
Arousal Patterns of Bisexual Men” by Gerulf Rieger, Meredith L.
Chivers, and J. Michael Bailey, which currently appears in
Psychological Science (Vol. 16, No. 8, August 2005), the
journal of the American Psychological Society. Bailey, the senior
author of the article, was until recently chair of the psychology
department at Northwestern University. He lost that position last
year but still serves as a professor there. The article questions
the veracity of bi men’s self-definition, and thus, the very
legitimacy of bisexuality as an orientation, at least for men.
(Women, the authors say, are not as easily quantified. They’ve done
other research showing all women are essentially bisexual,
but that’s another story.)

What they stuck on the men—a group of about 100 who were pretty
evenly divided into those who self-labeled as homo, hetero and
bi—was a penis meter that measures genital blood flow or level of
erection (technically called a plethysmograph). No subject was
offered film footage representing penile-vaginal intercourse
because, as the researchers later explained, they were afraid that
kind of footage would be too confusing to evaluate, since they
wouldn’t be able to tell whether the men’s penises were responding
to the female or the male or both. Each subject was, therefore,
shown several two minute male/male porn films and also several two
minute clips of female/female porn. The researchers threw out 35% of
their sample as “non-responders” (guys of all orientations for whom
the lab/wiring/porn thing didn’t work to get them aroused). Since
out of that remaining group the men who self-identified as bi had
penises that, for the most part, didn’t get hard during the
female/female clip(s), the researchers concluded that the bi men
were only masquerading as such and were homosexuals who hadn’t faced
their gayness yet.

Casting Doubt

Further, they opined that since arousal in men equals
orientation, bi men don’t exist. The study might have been
just another academic paper that never makes it out of obscure sex
research journals and sex research conference presentations, but the
researchers provided the Times with an advance copy of it.
Reporter Carey wrote, “… a new study casts doubt on whether true
bisexuality exists, at least in men.” By saying that the study
“casts doubt on” the existence of bisexuality, the Times
moved away from objective reporting and toward taking a position on
its validity. (This would not have been an issue had the article
simply read, “A new study questions whether true bisexuality
exists…”)

The Times effectively endorsed the researchers’ opinion,
giving the research much more credibility than it would have
otherwise had. The story made its way into other news media outlets
and was reprinted and commented on around the world. The researchers
also were strategic, or perhaps just lucky, to get the story into
the Times the same week a major sex research conference was
occurring in Ottawa, The International Academy of Sex Research
(IASR), thus assuring even more publicity for their assertions.

When the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)
challenged the Times about its inflammatory headline, their
response was that “straight, gay or lying” is a well known idiomatic
comment gays make about bisexuals, and therefore was appropriate.
Thinking this line of reasoning could sanction a lot more
inaccuracies and hate speech, GLAAD requested that the
Times at least change this article’s headline on their
website. They refused to do so. GLAAD issued a statement and mounted
a write-in
campaign to help mobilize people’s response.

The Organized Response

Within 24 hours of the article’s release an ad hoc coalition of
LGBT activists and academics came together, under the leadership of
the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, to coordinate a national
response. The Task Force prepared a press release and
a fact sheet critiquing the study the article was based upon.
More importantly, they enlisted BiNet USA: The National Bisexual
Network, the Bisexual
Resource Center of Boston, and GLAAD in a series of nationwide
conference calls that helped strategize a way to hold the
Times accountable for its hate speech and misinformation.
At least one group beyond the LGBT community—the progressive media
watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)—also issued
a statement protesting the Times handling of the research.

A week later, amidst a flurry of criticism, the Times
published a small selection of the many letters they had received on
the article. The only published letter defending the article was by
conservative gay writer Chandler Burr, who contributes to the
Times.

The story continued to grow legs well into the second and third
weeks after its initial release. While it remained one of the
Times’ website most forwarded articles for more than two
weeks, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles
Times covered public response to the story and asked additional
questions about the research’s original content. Increasing media
response came from blogs of all sorts, bisexual listservs, websites,
LGBT magazines, and local newspapers around the English-speaking
world—with reprints and discussions from Belfast to Baltimore,
Toronto to Atlanta, Sydney to Seattle, and many points in between.
Meanwhile, the ad hoc coalition moved ahead with plans to arrange a
meeting with the editor of the New York Times science
section to discuss the coverage of the research and their future
coverage of bisexuality and other sexual orientation/identity
issues. A meeting did finally take place on July 27. There,
coalition representatives aired their concerns and suggestions, and
the Times promised to take these into consideration in
future reporting.

The Research Flaws

The Task Force, with input from LGBT academics who had read
advance copies of the Bailey et. al. study, developed a preliminary
fact sheet. It points out that the Times fails “… to note
several serious and obvious questions about the study’s methodology
and underlying premises …” and also “… misstates some of the study’s
conclusions.” As the Task Force writers said, the assertion by
Bailey, Rieger, and Chivers that arousal, at least in men, equals
sexual orientation, is a ridiculous oversimplification of the
complexity of sexual desire. Rather, arousal is “… a combination of
cognitive and physical responses, not reducible to genital responses
to pornography.” They also questioned the validity of the
plethysmograph. The controversial device was first used in Eastern
Europe during the 1950s to find draft dodgers among men who
were excused from military service because they claimed to be gay.
The Task Force fact sheet further asked how seriously one could take
any study that had to throw out 35% of its respondents as
non-responders (those men who had no measurable erections while
watching the films), and pointed out that the researchers said that
this study was part of a larger group of other such studies but that
it really was not.

In addition to the above methodological problems, the fact sheet
noted “many serious controversies that have plagued one of the
study’s authors” (Bailey). The New York Times didn’t
mention that Bailey’s research reputation has been seriously
questioned. As the Task Force efforts continued, it
became increasingly clear that the controversy over his past
writings and research methods was wide indeed.

Bailey made an unwelcome name for himself within the transgender
community several years ago, culminating in the 2003 publication of
his book about trans women, The Man Who Would Be Queen.
When The Man Who Would Be Queen came out Publishers
Weekly said that “… Bailey’s scope is so broad that when he
gets down to pivotal constructs, as in detailing the data of
scientific studies such as Richard Green’s about ‘feminine boys’ or
Dean Hamer’s work on the so-called ‘gay gene,’ the material is
vague, and not cohesive. Bailey tends towards overreaching,
unsupported generalizations, such as his claim that ‘regardless of
marital laws there will always be fewer gay men who are romantically
attached’ or that the African-American community is ‘a relatively
anti-gay ethnic minority.’ Add to this the debatable supposition
that innate ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits, in the most general
sense of the words, decidedly exist, and his account as a whole
loses force.”

Since the book came out Northwestern University received many
complaints from transsexual women Bailey interviewed, who complained
that they didn’t know he was using them as research subjects, and
that distorted versions of their case histories would appear in his
book. Northwestern opened a formal investigation into charges of
research misconduct against Bailey, as reported in a series of
articles in the Daily Northwestern and the Chronicle of
Higher Education. In October 2004 Bailey resigned from his
chairmanship of the psychology department, following the completion
of the investigation and implementation of undisclosed sanctions
against him by the university (Chronicle of Higher Education,
December 10, 2004).

Sexuality Research: The Larger Picture

The Bailey, Rieger, Chiver research is part of a long line of
studies that look for a genetic link to sexual orientation, as
developed most recently by Dean Hamer, Simon LeVay, et. al. In an
interesting yet probably totally unintended coincidence, the
national gay news magazine The Advocate came out with a
related cover story on July 5, the same day the New York
Times released “Straight, Gay or Lying.” The
Advocate’s story, “Scents and Sexuality,” by Lisa Neff, reports
on new studies about sexual orientation and smell. She then segues
into a summary of genetics and sexual orientation studies over the
past hundred years. While the survey article is quite well done, it
overlooks bisexual, transgender, and intersex people and the
increasing body of research developed on them in the past 20 years.
Why does this disconnect still exist? There’s no simple answer.
However examining the origins of sexual orientation research does
provide some clues.

Psychologists look at sexual orientation in two essentially
different ways: the dichotomous approach (that which is not
heterosexual is homosexual) and the more multidimensional approach,
which views orientation more as a spectrum than two separate and
distinct poles. Of course the best known example of this spectrum
view is the Kinsey scale which encompasses a range from exclusively
heterosexual (0) to exclusively homosexual (6), with most people
falling somewhere in between.

According to bisexual psychologist and author Ron Fox, the field
has been evolving through a three stage reinterpretation of sexual
orientation since the early ’70s when therapists stopped seeing
homosexuality as an illness. At the first stage it’s fine to be
lesbian or gay since homosexuality is no longer an illness, but
sexual orientation itself is still seen as dichotomous, either/or,
same sex or different sex oriented, with nothing in
between. Most of psychology has now moved beyond that stage and sees
dichotomous sexual orientation as too simplistic. At this second
stage bisexuality is recognized as a legitimate orientation. This
stage also reflects the point at which gay organizations began
adding bisexual to their names, as in LGB. When the
multidimensionality of sexual orientation is sufficiently explored
it becomes clear that gender identity and expression, as well, exist
along a similar continuum rather than only at two poles. This is the
third stage, where, as a result of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender psychologists working together with heterosexuals to
develop a more complex understanding of sexual orientation, the same
complex understanding of gender becomes integrated into how
psychology and sexuality research is conducted and taught.

And this new, more nuanced understanding of both sexual
orientation and gender as spectrums isn’t only confined to the
research field. Activists and educators must often position their
media advocacy and public sexuality education work in the gap
between the old dichotomous view of sexual orientation and the
newer, more multidimensional one. As they do this they hone classic
bisexual skills, particularly the roles of bridge builder and
diplomat. It is their talent to move back and forth—translating
between groups and different sets of ideas, interpreting each to the
other, and helping everyone see we’re not so far apart as it
seems—that helps them survive with their identities and integrity
intact. A positive outcome from the New York Times article
is the coordinated effort to critique Bailey et. al’s research. Four
scholars have already submitted response letters to
Psychological Science, and queries to other related
sexuality research journals are also now in progress.

This particular story of how we responded to one article elapsed
over a mere month in time. But the larger picture of how this
experience relates to other queer stories with unexplored bi angles
remains to be told. We look forward to discussions on related topics
such as: the developing definition of bisexual orientation, the
relationship between transgender and bisexual identities, and ex-gay
reparative/conversion therapy and its connection to bisexuality. All
of this and more came up in our brainstorming around how to respond
to the New York Times. It’s been a valuable
learning experience, one that has provided some sense of comfort and
accomplishment to counterbalance the underlying pain and human
suffering for bisexuals and those who love us that the publication
of the Times’ “Straight, Gay or Lying” story initially
exposed.

Loraine
Hutchins, Ph.D., is a sex coach who teaches women's health at
Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland. She co-edited Bi
Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, the book that helped
put the "B" in LGBT.